Yo!
Check out the SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) plug in from
Adobe. SVG is the new graphics standard fro the W3C. The
Adobe plug in is very scriptable from the DOM and Javascript.
There are filters for things like animated fire effects in the
Adobe plugin that use fractal noise.The
Whoathis is very cool stuff...lots of paramaters you can muck with
to get high quality animations and images. Looks like it's going
head-to-head with the type of sites and imagery created with Flash. I
wonder if the macromedia folks with wind up exporting SVG from their
authoring software.